Although the bishops have not repented for consecrating the openly gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, they have repented for not consulting.

The Windsor report, set up by Dr Williams in an attempt to resolve the Anglican Communion's crisis over gays, did not ask for moratorium on the consecration of heterosexual bishops, just homosexual ones. So in pledging to halt all episcopal consecrations, Ecusa's bishops have gone further than necessary.

Dr Graham Kings, Vicar of St Mary's Islington and secretary of the new evangelical group Fulcrum, said: "There is a shift, but it is still a bit shifty."

I have to agree. The bishops' statement is the politics of the playground. They are saying, in effect, "If we can't have gay bishops, we're not going to have straight ones either."

This situation cannot continue. An episcopal church without any bishops would be a true oxymoron, even if it appealed to many of us in the pews.

At the primates' meeting in Northern Ireland last month, 35 of the 38 world Anglican leaders present called for repentance and a moratorium on any future gay consecrations or same-sex blessings.

The communion had hoped to give itself three years' breathing space by asking Ecusa and Canada to withdraw their representatives on the Anglican Consultative Council, the British charity which is the formal constitutional body at the centre of the worldwide Anglican Church, until the 2008 Lambeth Conference.

But the action of Ecusa's bishops has brought the crisis back to the present once more.

Now Ecusa's General Convention in 2006 will have to decide whether to keep the moratorium. And after its principled actions in support of lesbians and gays over the last few years, it can hardly start discriminating against this section of its community again.

It seems to me that it will be forced either to continue with its moratorium on all episcopal ordinations, creating huge difficulties for increasing numbers of leaderless dioceses, or to risk parting from the worldwide Anglican Church or, at the very least, a return to war footing.

The US conservative commentator David Virtue, of the Virtueonline website, is scathing about the bishops' statement. Acknowleding that Ecusa has delayed an inevitable split, he argues: "By saying no bishops will be consecrated it punishes those dioceses who need bishops."

"This covenant is both phony and dangerous. It is filled with a lot of high-sounding 'graciouspeak' language but its long term aim is corrosive and designed to wear down the remnant orthodox, so people will grow tired, thus depleting them of whatever resources they have left to fight the revisionist stream-roller," he comments.